Chris Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, speaks at the University of Vermont's Ira Allen Chapel on Wednesday. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

Written by

Free Press Staff Writer

Chris Hedges doesn’t want the radical protest movement he promotes to seize power from the political and corporate elites. He just wants it to scare the bejesus out of them.

That’s what the Occupy Wall Street movement was beginning to do, he told an attentive audience at the University of Vermont Wednesday night, before the encampments were subjected to overweening surveillance and shut down by the authorities.

“All the issues that pushed people into those encampments” — chronic unemployment, rising student loan debt, among them — “are still with us and getting worse,” Hedges said. Moreover, he said, they were issues that resonated with Main Street and even with some of the first-line police patrolmen dispatched to Zuccotti Park in New York City. Nothing frightens the elite more than when “foot soldiers tasked with imposing order” start sympathizing or consorting with the other side, he said.

Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times turned social critic and political activist, drew a crowd of about 250 to the Ira Allen Chapel to a lecture sponsored by the Peace & Justice Center and other organizations. Tickets were $10 in advance, $15 at the door, and free to UVM students. Roughly half the listeners appeared to be middle-aged or older.

He spoke for about an hour and then took questions from members of the audience, some of whom had speeches of their own. His talk was laced with literary references to works by the likes of Howard Zinn and Karl Popper, Herman Melville and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as social critics such as Dwight Macdonald and Malcolm Cowley whose ranks he has joined with his own books and essays.

Hedges’ talk ranged through a history of U.S. radical movements and their evisceration (by the World War I-era Sedition Act, for example, and by the House Un-American Activities Committee of the ’50s), and of the rise of the corporate state. He said the corporate state prevails in large part by commodifying people and the natural world, and by defining the limits of public discourse with the help of compliant mainstream media.

(Page 2 of 2)

MSNBC and Fox News are two sides of the same coin, he said, both trafficking in what he characterized as corporate-sanctioned “garbage” — all in support of a political system he said was a form of “inverted totalitarianism.”

He dwelled briefly on a lawsuit he filed against President Barack Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012. The focus of the lawsuit, which Hedges said received negligible media coverage except in the Times, was Section 1021(b)(2), which permits the indefinite detention of anyone “who was a part of or substantially supported Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged against the United States or its coalition partners ...”

Hedges’ contention that the act is unconstitutional was upheld by a federal judge last fall (“We won — for now,” was the headline on his blog post for Truthdig). A government appeal is pending.

Hedges also took Obama to task for his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistle-blowers and for enabling government access to phone and email records.

Asked how safe the Internet is from surveillance, Hedges replied: “It’s not safe at all.”

“We are the most monitored, eavesdropped, surveilled, watched, listened to, profiled population in human history, and that includes the Stassi state,” he said, referring to East Germany.

The rise of the corporate state, Hedges said, has led to the emergence of “faux liberals” — he cited Obama and former President Bill Clinton as examples — who speak the traditional language of liberalism but serve corporate interests.

He said Bill McKibben, whom he respects, is “naive” in urging Obama to ban construction of the Keystone Pipeline that would transmit tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

“Appealing to the traditional center of power,” he said, “is a misunderstanding of power.”

“What we care about is of no concern to the forces that actually dominate the centers of power,” he said, referring to impending climate change. “That’s the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street, Halliburton, this system of inverted totalitarians. And what’s frightening is, there’s very little time left.”

He concluded with some thoughts of “where we should go, what we should do.” Drawing from his experience as a foreign correspondent, he said, “You can tell when the tinder is there, but you never know the spark that is going to set it off.”

He advised his listeners to resist, to get arrested, to stop the pipeline by obstructing it with their bodies, to go to jail.

“The most important thing to recognize in building a movement is that it’s not our job to take power,” he said, adding that “radical movements are always in perpetual alienation from those in power.”

“Our job is not to be in power,” he said. “It’s our job to make them so frightened that they react.”

“Rebels always walk out alone,” he said. “Don’t wait for anybody. You have to take the first step.”